The Settings of Shakespeare's Plays Shakespeare Hits the Big Time Bard Bites Dramatist and Shakespearean scholar Nicholas Rowe was the first to write a critical (annotated) edition of Shakespeare's works. ___ The average length of a play in Elizabethan England was 3000 lines. With 4,042 lines and 29,551 words, Hamlet is the longest Shakespearean play (based on the first edition of The Riverside Shakespeare (1974)). With 1,787 lines and 14,369 words, The Comedy of Errors is the shortest Shakespearean play (also based on the first edition of The Riverside Shakespeare). ___ Shakespeare's late comedies are considered romances: The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Cymbeline, and Pericles. The Two Noble Kinsman is also sometimes mentioned along side these other plays as a romantic comedy. ___ Love's Labour's Lost has the highest percentage of rhyming lines of all of Shakespeare's plays. According to Shakespearean scholar Tucker Brooke, 62.2% of the lines in Love's Labour's Lost rhyme.

The closest competitor is A Midsummer Night's Dream, with 43.4% rhyming lines. ___ The historical time of King Lear is roughly 800 BC, making it the second-earliest setting of any of Shakespeare's plays. Click here to find out the first. What Kind of Novels Did Shakespeare Write? - The New Yorker What Kind of Novels Did Shakespeare Write? By November 9, 2015 A portrait believed to be the only one painted of Shakespeare during his lifetime.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY LEON NEAL / AFP / GETTY In October, the publisher Hogarth rolled out the first in its ambitious new line of Shakespeare plays retold by contemporary novelists.

The pairings are promising: Margaret Atwood, a master of ecological dystopias, will reimagine “The Tempest,” for instance, while Gillian Flynn, who knows her way around marriage and murder, will take on “Hamlet.” The début novel in the series is more of a curveball: the versatile Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of Shakespeare’s late puzzler, “The Winter’s Tale.” According to the Times , Winterson’s publisher was surprised that she passed up “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” and “Macbeth,” and chose instead what the reporter calls “one of Shakespeare’s most baffling, jarring and uneven plays.” The play is a mashup of disparate modes, reflecting the Jacobean taste for tragicomedy. The first three acts spin a vicious web of obsession and betrayal: King Leontes of Sicilia, certain that his wife, Hermione, is sleeping with his best friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia, tears his own world apart—he tries to have Polixenes poisoned, rejects his newborn daughter as a bastard, and puts Hermione on trial for treason, creating such anguish that their son dies; when his wife hears that news, she drops dead as well.

Then the figure of Time appears onstage to announce a sixteen-year leap forward. When the story resumes, the banished daughter, Perdita, who has come of age in Bohemia, attracts the affections of Florizel, the disguised son of Polixenes. Can the children’s love heal their parents’ strife? It’s pastoral romance grafted onto royal tragedy, “As You Like It” giving “Othello” a shot at redemption. What baffles many critics, beyond the juxtaposed genres, is the cause of Leontes’s jealousy. Unlike in “Othello,” there is no Iago to prompt his mistrust.

Shakespeare’s play is itself a cover version, adapting an Elizabethan prose romance, by Robert Greene; in the original, Greene gives the king’s worries a slow build: “These and such like doubtful thoughts a long time smothering in his stomach began at last to kindle in his mind a secret mistrust, which, increased by suspicion, grew at last to be a flaming jealousy that so tormented him as he could take no rest.” But Shakespeare sacrifices credibility for dramatic urgency: when Leontes sees Hermione and Polixenes conversing in their first scene, he simply flares up: “Too hot, too hot!” The play elides causal accounts—it ends with an invitation to provide explanations, but only offstage, where, Leontes says, “we may leisurely / Each one demand an answer to his part / Performed in this wide gap of time.” These missing answers give Jeanette Winterson an opening, and a title for her novel: “The Gap of Time.” As she explains , “This is a play where every motive is hidden somewhere, but just out of reach, dropped in the gaps.

Shakespeare doesn’t give us anybody’s backstory.” By filling in those gaps, Winterson turns the play into a deeply psychoanalytic fable, squeezing Leontes next to Oedipus on the therapist’s couch. (“ ‘The Winter’s Tale’ is ‘Othello’ post-Freud,” she writes.) But she also suggests a way to approach the characters that goes beyond the tradition of psychological realism. By moving her own tale toward fantasy, she shifts our understanding of Shakespeare, too, pulling him out of the shadow of the realist novel. Just as Shakespeare pillaged the novella traditions of France and Italy for his comic plots, novelists have long turned to Shakespeare for inspiration. It’s hard to find the hero of a bildungsroman—from Tom Jones and Pamela through Wilhelm Meister, Pip, Maggie Tulliver, Huck Finn, and Stephen Dedalus—who doesn’t bump into Hamlet (in allusion, performance, or archetype) along the path to maturity. Even Emma Bovary hears “That is the question” quoted, in English, during her romantic agony.

Beyond echoes and appropriations, the first sustained attempt to turn Shakespeare’s plays into long narrative prose—putting aside the short children’s versions in Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1807 “Tales from Shakespeare”—was “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,” by Mary Cowden Clarke, a set of novellas published serially, from 1850 to 1852. Although Shakespeare seldom presented childhood as anything more than a brief recollection, Clarke imagined the lives of Shakespeare’s female characters before the plays began. The author of a concordance of Shakespeare’s works, Clarke freed Juliet, Ophelia, and Desdemona from the confines of the scripts, providing them with something we seem increasingly to prize: a backstory. Clarke’s girlhood of Lady Macbeth, “The Thane’s Daughter,” reads like a Victorian forerunner to “The Bad Seed,” with a neglected child mangling insects before she grows up to counsel murder—the prequel as case history. Novelizing Shakespeare thus meant psychologizing his works.

One Victorian appraisal of George Eliot claimed that she “might have accomplished the writing out of a Shakespearian drama into a novel,” because she shared Shakespeare’s commitment to “psychological analysis,” to “tracing, stage by stage, the growth in the human mind of evil or of good.” The critic continued by citing what he described as a nineteenth-century commonplace: “if Shakespeare had lived in the Victorian age, he would have written novels.” This assumption shaped Shakespeare criticism as well. If you were assigned any Shakespeare critic in high school, it was probably A. C. Bradley, the Oxford professor of poetry, whose lectures on Shakespearean tragedy were published in 1904 and have remained continuously in print.

Bradley analyzed tragedy “from the psychological point of view,” suggesting that readers of “Hamlet” “would understand it better if they read an account of melancholia in a work on mental diseases.” (Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams” had appeared four years earlier.) In the nineteenth century, “Richard II” was reprinted more often than “King Lear,” and “Coriolanus” went through as many editions as “Othello.” But Bradley considered “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” and “Macbeth” “the four principal tragedies of Shakespeare”—in large part because they proved most receptive to his psychological focus. His ranking has persisted to the present: those were the four plays that Winterson’s publisher expected her to pick first. As in Clarke’s “Girlhood” narratives, Bradley tried to find out what Shakespeare’s characters were like before the plays began—how Hamlet behaved before his father’s death, how Cordelia was affected by growing up with Goneril and Regan as sisters. He wanted to read Shakespeare’s plays as though they were realist novels.

Winterson’s “The Gap of Time” may seem at first to reflect this approach to Shakespeare, as it provides personal histories and motivations that Shakespeare did not bother to explain. King Leontes of Sicilia becomes a present-day Londoner named Leo, the head of the Sicilia hedge fund. He dresses in Hugo Boss, drives a Porsche, and uses a Webcam to spy on his wife, MiMi. After he leverages too many assets, he plops onto the sofa of his analyst, Dr. Wartz, to talk about his mother. And, when he starts to suspect that MiMi might be sleeping with his best friend, Xeno, his mind zips back to their boarding-school days together. Building on Polixenes’s brief mention of his boyhood frolics with Leontes as “twinned lambs that did frisk i’ the sun,” Winterson spins out a blissful, dangerous recollection of Xeno and Leo’s adolescence: nights at the shooting range, daredevil cycling, David Bowie, and sex—with each other. It’s the Gay Boyhood of Shakespeare’s Heroes, the prequel Clarke never wrote.

When Leo’s assistant asks, “Are you jealous of him or of her?,” Leo shoots back, “Spare me the TV psychoanalysis.” Repression is basically a confession. But Winterson finds the principles of psychoanalysis at play in fantasy as well as realism. The fullest articulation of Freudian theory in the novel comes from one of its most outlandish characters: Autolycus, the loquacious peddler-cum-pickpocket in Shakespeare’s version, reimagined as a used-car shyster at Autos Like Us (“A wheeler-dealer. A dealer in wheels”). In the Louisiana idyll of New Bohemia, he hawks a DeLorean to take a customer back to the future, and dizzies him with an account of the Oedipus complex: “Biggest theory in psychoanalysis and the western world.” Winterson’s precursor here seems less A. C.

Bradley’s psychological reading of “Hamlet”—let alone George Eliot’s patient Shakespearean tracing of the growth of a mind—than Salman Rushdie’s pyrotechnic story “Yorick,” which rewrites “Hamlet” as the offspring of Freud and the digressive narrator of “Tristram Shandy.” In Rushdie’s spoof, a vellum manuscript reveals that the young prince, agitated at the sight of his parents in bed, had enlisted the jester Yorick to poison his father: the primal scene engenders the Oedipus complex, with “velluminous” puns along the way. Rushdie, as he writes in his memoir “Joseph Anton,” wanted to reroute the current of the British novel away from psychological realism—the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis’s austere “Great Tradition” of Austen, Eliot, and James—and let it flow instead through Sterne, Dickens, and Joyce, experimental stylists who, as Rushdie puts it, “understood the unreality of ‘reality.’ “ He grouped in writers outside Britain such as Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and G. V.

Desani to form a “rival ‘Great Tradition’ “ that pushed the boundaries of what language could represent in the novel. The story “Yorick,” in Rushdie’s collection “East, West,” fuelled his project: Shakespeare could spur a clever, savage “Cock-and-Bull” lark just as well as he could inspire sober interiority of the Eliot variety—and a writer from Muslim Bombay could play that Shakespeherian rag as shrewdly as any Cambridge don. You could see Winterson, at times a fabulist and a dazzling stylist, enter this rival tradition, too.

(A bit in “The Gap of Time” about HollyPollyMolly, triplet foundlings from Guangzhou who sing “Hillbilly Soul Banjo” in a girl group called the Separations, nearly plays like the Rushdie parody.) The main section of her novel opens in the manner of a modern fairy tale: “There was a man lived in an airport.” And its conclusion offers a rather utopian vision of millennial London harmony: where Shakespeare’s Leontes pairs off his adviser Paulina with another courtier, Winterson’s Pauline, an educated German-Jewish émigrée, gets together with Shep, a black Pentecostal piano player from New Bohemia, while Shep’s Indian son heads off with Leo’s transgender receptionist. As these couplings indicate, Winterson is playing with Shakespeare’s genders as well as his genres.

(Virginia Woolf’s androgynous games with “As You Like It” in her mock biography, “Orlando,” also published by Hogarth, could be another touchstone.) Within the novel, “The Gap of Time” refers to a computer game that Xeno designs to move beyond the typical macho gaming fare of “cars, fights, theft, risk, girls and reward.” In Xeno’s game, the goal is to outwit androgynous angels by finding a lost baby girl before time runs out. It’s not quite Grand Theft Auto V, but it is the plot of “The Winter’s Tale,” which redeems time by recovering the lost daughter, Perdita. Winterson, an adopted child herself, writes in the epilogue that the play has been a “private text” for her experience as a foundling, especially in its final movement toward forgiveness. “The female principle saves the play from the usual consequences of male rage,” she notes. Fusing pastoral romance with royal tragedy isn’t a clumsy move on Shakespeare’s part: it’s a strategy for recuperation.

In “Othello,” Desdemona can’t be saved, but, in “The Winter’s Tale,” Perdita’s return brings her mother, Hermione, back to life. Swerving away from Greene’s romance, the end of “The Winter’s Tale” is one of the most magical and incredible scenes in Shakespeare. “It is required / you do awake your faith,” Paulina tells Leontes, cuing music that turns a stone statue of Hermione back to moving flesh. Can art compensate for loss? the play asks. Perhaps, if faith can replace suspicion and if a king will believe the women around him. Winterson downplays the resurrection scene in “The Gap of Time.” MiMi returns from exile in Paris and, “standing like a statue in the light,” croons a song called “Perdita” for her daughter, while Xeno puts his arm around Leo.

But Winterson’s real magic comes less from her plot than from her lyrical swoops: “They watched the plane rise from the runway like an impossible bird.” “I lift out the baby and she’s light as a star.” Even the Oedipus complex, Autolycus admits, is ultimately “a metaphor.” Adopted into a strict evangelical community, Winterson presents a fallen world—angels literally crash to earth, at least in Xeno’s computer game—where a poetic marriage of realism and fantasy offers the best hope for redemption. Looking through the lens of the nineteenth-century psychological novel, A. C. Bradley had trouble seeing past “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” and “Macbeth.” Bringing a set of bifocals—psychological and poetic, realistic and fabulous—Winterson suggests that the gaps in “The Winter’s Tale” deserve our attention, too. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner teaches English at Linfield College, in Oregon.

The Winter's Tale Play: Overview of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale The Winter’s Tale Play: Overview & Resources You are here: Home / The Winter’s Tale Play: Overview & Resources The Winter’s Tale play is set in Sicily and Bohemia. Shakespeare gives the land-locked Bohemia a coastline and ports, showing a gap in his geographical knowledge. It makes no difference the the high quality of the play, however. See full details in The Winter’s Tale setting Date written: 1610 or 1611 Genre classification: The Winter’s Tale is generally regarded as one of Shakespeare’s tragedies . Main characters in The Winter’s Tale: Leontes is the King of Sicilia. He is a good, kind man, who becomes irrationally jealous and creats havock among his friends and family. He finally repents and tries to make up for it. Hermione is Leontes’ wife and the Queen of Sicilia. She is the victim of Leontes’ jealousy and suffers badly. Polixenes is the King of Bohemia and an old friend of Leontes. He’s the object of Leontes’ jealousy. Perdita is Leontes’ beautiful daughter.

Leontes, believing her to be the result of his wife’s adulterous relationship orders her to be abandoned in the countryside and she is raised by a shepherd. Florizel, son of Polizenes, falls in love with Perdita. Camillo is a loyal lord at the court of Sicilia. He finally brings everyone together for the resolution. Paulina is the wife of a Sicilian courtier. She is brave and steadfast, opposing Leontes throughout, acting as his conscience. See all characters in The Winter’s Tale. The Winter’s Tale themes: Jealousy and its effects is the main theme of The Winter’s Tale. The limitations and defects of kingly authority is another. Social class and attitudes to that feature in this play. The corruption and sterility of sophisticated city life versus the purity of the natural life of the countryside is an important theme. Read more about characters in The Winter’s Tale . The Winter’s Tale Play Resources: 14 Free Shakespeare Plays in New York City This Summer - TheaterMania.com 14 Free Shakespeare Plays in New York City This Summer You can see theater all summer and never spend a cent!

Zachary Stewart • Off-Broadway • Jun 6, 2016 While the posh set flees to the Hamptons, one of the great pleasures of staying in New York City during the dog days is all the great free Shakespeare. Here are 14 productions you'll want to see as you sweat out the summer months: Director Phyllida Lloyd (center) observes a rehearsal for The Taming of the Shrew, set to play the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. (© Joan Marcus) 1. The Taming of the Shrew – Shakespeare in the Park (through June 26) The most professional of the free summer offerings, this year's Shakespeare in the Park features Janet McTeer and Cush Jumbo in Phyllida Lloyd's all-female production of the Bard's popular makeover comedy. In the last several seasons, Lloyd has helmed acclaimed all-female productions of Henry IV and Julius Caesar. The men return from war in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Nicholas Martin-Smith, at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park. (© Susane Lee) 2.

Much Ado About Nothing – Hudson Warehouse (through June 26) Shakespeare's great battle-of-the-sexes romantic comedy returns to the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park (it was last presented there in 2008) under the direction of Hudson Warehouse founder Nicholas Martin-Smith. The company of The Two Gentlemen of Verona takes the dogs for a walk in Inwood Hill Park. (© Ted Minos) 3. The Two Gentlemen of Verona – Inwood Shakespeare Festival (June 8-25) Moose Hall Theatre Company takes on Shakespeare's early comedy of cross-dressing and intrigue. It's worth the trek to northern Manhattan as this may very well be your last chance to see the company perform on the peninsula at Inwood Hill Park: After this season, it goes on hiatus to raise funds for a permanent venue. Kate Ross plays Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, directed by Beth Ann Hopkins, at Brooklyn's Carroll Park. (© Chris Montgomery) 4.

The Tempest – Smith Street Stage (June 8-26) Smith Street Stage brings magic and mystery to Brookyln's Carroll Park with this play about the exiled Duke of Milan (played here by an actress) and daughter, Miranda. A scene from New York Classical Theatre's 2015 production of Measure for Measure staged at the East Coast Memorial in Battery Park. (© Miranda Arden) 5. A Midsummer Night's Dream – New York Classical Theatre (through July 17) New York's "runaround Shakespeare" company presents this summertime favorite in its uniquely panoramic style. If you miss the June run at the company's usual spot (the 103rd Street pool in Central Park), catch the production when it tours to Battery Park City, Prospect Park, and Carl Schurz Park on the Upper East Side in July. Hudson Warehouse's 2015 production of Titus Andronicus was so bloody, it featured a splash zone. (© Susane Lee) 6.

Lysistrata: Let's Make America Great Again – Hudson Warehouse (June 30-July 24) All right, so this adaptation of Aristophanes' classic isn't Shakespeare, but the subtitle was too enticing to ignore. Hudson Warehouse presents sweaty politics in Athens on the eve of the (probably equally dramatic) political conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia. Dan Teachout played Macbeth and David Sitler played Banquo in the 2015 Shakespeare in the Parking Lot production of Macbeth. (© Lee Wexler) 7. Midsummer Night's Dream – Shakespeare in the Parking Lot (July 7-24) Tired of the bucolic trappings of Shakespeare in the Park? Try Shakespeare in the Parking Lot, which starts its season with a presentation of the Bard's popular summertime romp in the parking lot behind the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center on Manhattan's Lower East Side. No car required. A scene from New York Classical Theatre's 2004 production of The Winter's Tale. (© Miranda Arden) 8.

The Winter's Tale – New York Classical Theatre (July 18-August 14) Audiences are invited to Sicily and Bohemia in this panoramic production, set to play the Battery and Brooklyn Bridge Park. Hamish Linklater and Lily Rabe starred in the 2015 production of Shakespeare's Cymbeline, directed by Daniel Sullivan, at the Delacorte Theater for the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park. (© Carol Rosegg) 9. Troilus & Cressida – Shakespeare in the Park (July 19-August 14) Shakespeare in the Park visionary Daniel Sullivan directs Shakespeare's rarely produced tragedy, set in the waning days of the Trojan War. Jane Bradley starred in director Hamilton Clancey's steampunk adaptation of As You Like It in the parking lot last year. (© Lee Wexler) 10. As You Like It – Shakespeare in Bryant Park (July 21-23) This steampunk variation on the Bard's comedy of love and mistaken identity played Shakespeare in the Parking Lot last season. Featuring original music by Natalie Smith, the production has now found a new Forest of Arden: Bryant Park.

Evangelia Kingsley and Joy Marr starred in Hip to Hip Theatre Company's 2015 production of The Merchant of Venice. (© Julian Voloj) 11. As You Like It & Julius Caesar – Hip to Hip Theatre Company (July 27-August 28) The Woodside-based Hip to Hip Theatre Company is definitely the most well-traveled of the outdoor Shakespeare troupes in New York City: The wandering players plan to visit 13 venues with their repertory productions of As You Like It and Julius Caesar. That includes stops in four boroughs, Jersey City, and the Hamptons. Steve Guttenberg (center) starred in Hudson Warehouse's 2015 production of Henry IV, Part 1. (© Susane Lee) 12. Othello – Hudson Warehouse (July 28-August 21) Hudson Warehouse rounds out the summer with this tragedy of jealousy and racial animosity in Venetian Cyprus. Lucas Calzada, Drew Valins, and Andrew Bryce starred in the 2015 Shakespeare in the Parking Lot production of Macbeth, directed by Jesse Ontiveros, in the parking lot behind the Clemente.

(© Aurelie Camus) 13. The Merchant of Venice – Shakespeare in the Parking Lot (July 28-August 14) Shakespeare in the Parking Lot is using this season to spotlight powerful women in Shakespeare's plays. "Watch what we do with the characters of Portia and Jessica," the company teases on its website. This drama of debt, justice, and "the quality of mercy" certainly offers fertile ground for bold directorial choices. Jarrod Bates, Michael Bernstein, Wayne Willinger, Eric Paterniani, and David Sitler opened the 2016 Shakespeare in Bryant Park season with Much Ado About Nothing. (© Jonathan Slaff) 14. Measure for Measure – Shakespeare in Bryant Park (September 1-18) The Drilling Company closes out the summer (which officially ends September 21) with Shakespeare's famously problematic play about strict morality and abuse of power in Vienna. templateeliz by Adam Dozier, Mayra Izurieta, Kyle Lazell, and Sarah Viar William Shakespeare's plays come in many forms. There are the histories, tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies.

Among the most popular are the comedies, which are full of laughter, irony, satire, and wordplay. Many times the question is asked: what makes a play a comedy instead of a tragedy ? Comedies treat subjects lightly, meaning they don't treat seriously such things as love. Shakespeare's comedies often use puns, metaphors, and insults to provoke "thoughtful laughter." The action is often strained by artificiality, especially elaborate and contrived endings. Disguises and mistaken identities are often very common. The plot is very important in Shakespeare's comedies. They are often very convoluted, twisted and confusing, and extremely hard to follow. Another characteristic of Shakespearean comedy is the themes of love and friendship, played within a courtly society. Songs often sung by a jester or a fool parallel the events of the plot. Also, foil and stock characters are often inserted into the plot. Love provides the main ingredient for the plot. If the lovers are unmarried when the play opens, they either have not met or there is some obstacle in the way of their love.

Examples of the obstacles these lovers go through are familiar to every reader of Shakespeare: the slanderous tongues which nearly wreck love in Much Ado About Nothing; the father insistent upon his daughter marrying his choice, as in A Midsummer Nights Dream; or the expulsion of the rightful Duke's daughter in As You Like It. Shakespeare uses many predictable patterns in his plays. The hero rarely appears in the opening lines; however, we hear about him from other characters. The hero does not normally make an entrance for a few lines, at least, if not a whole scene. The hero is also virtuous and strong, but he always possesses a character flaw. In the comedy itself, Shakespeare assumes that we know the basic plot, and he jumps right into it with little or no explanation. Foreshadowing and foreboding are put in the play early and can be heard throughout the drama. All Shakespearean comedies have five acts. The climax of the play is always during the third act. Shakespearean comedies also contain a wide variety of characters. Shakespeare often introduces a character and then discards him, never to be seen again in the balance of the play.

Shakespeare's female leads are usually described as petite, and often they assume male disguises. Often, foul weather parallels the emotional state of the characters.The audience is often informed of events before the characters, and when a future meeting is to take place it usually doesn't happen immediately. Character names are often clues to their roles and personalities, such as Malvolio from Twelfth Night, and Bottom in A Midsummer Nights Dream. Many themes are repeated throughout Shakespearean comedies. One theme is the never-ending struggle between the the forces of good and evil. Another theme is that love has profound effects, and that people often hide behind false faces. The comedies themselves can be sub-categorized as tragicomedies, romantic comedies, comedies of justice, and simple entertaining comedies with good wholesome fun. Many of these plays remain popular favorites 400 years after they were written. A Midsummer Night's Dream was written in 1596. It has become one of Shakespeare's most loved comedies. It makes fun of everything from love at first sight to realistic staging. The play refers to "fair vestal throned by the west," which was once thought to have been a polite acknowledgement of the Queen's presence in the audience.

The play was first printed in a quarto edition in 1600. Much Ado About Nothing is a romantic comedy about a love relationship. It has a basic plot that's more orthodox than those of most of Shakespeare's plays. It's about two strong personalities who see each other as combatants, rather than partners. The play exploits games of verbal punning and backchat between two reluctant lovers. Much Ado About Nothing first appeared in a quarto 1599. Twelfth Night is the most intricate of Shakespeare's great middle-period comedies. Written in 1601, it plays the familiar games of the time with boys playing girls who dress as boy pages. It is also filled with confusions of identity and memorable verbal put-downs. The play was not printed until the First Folio of 1623. The Winter's Tale is a late tragicomedy, written in 1609-1610. It ranges through sixteen years in time, marked by the choric figure of Time himself, and through a fantastic geographical and range from Sicily to Bohemia. Shakespeare took this story, which shows the healing and restorative power of love, from an old romance.

The play was printed originally in the First Folio of 1623. The Merry Wives of Windsor, written some time between 1597 and 1599, is the only comedy that Shakespeare set in his own time and country. For all the London scenes with Falstaff in the history plays, Shakespeare usually chose to set his comedies in a foreign land. The use of local settings was still very new in the plays of this time. The play is an exciting piece of work, full of eccentric characters and slapstick comedy. The play first appeared in a memorial version, written down largely from memory, in 1602. A better text appeared in the First Folio. Even though William Shakespeare died many years ago, his works are still remembered and cherished. His plays are popular and are still performed all over the world. Shakespeare's comedies are still loved and looked to as classics. Works Consulted * Gurr, Anderew. William Shakespeare: The Extraordinary Life of the Most Successful Writer of all Time. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, LTD., 1995. 6, 161-181. The book gives an overview of all of Shakespeare's plays.

We also used a picture of Nick Bottom with the ass's head from A Midsummer Nights Dream. Haines, Charles. William Shakespeare and His Plays . New York: Franklin Watts Inc., 1968. 51-66. This books talks about Shakespeare's comedies and what they're about. It outlines some of his comedies and tells the histories of them. *Hamlyn, Paul. The Life and Times of Shakespeare. New York: The Hamlyn Publishing Group Ltd. 1968. 53. The visual from Shakespeare's comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor comes from this source. Holzknecht, K. The Backgrounds of Shakespeare's Plays. New York: American Book Company, 1950. 268- 292. The chapter compares the humor of Jonson and Shakespeare. It also talks about the emotional appeal of Shakespeare's comedies. They mixed morality elements with coarse and tasteless fun. The roots of English comedies are in humor rather than in wit, and Shakespeare followed this unacademic tradition, according to the authors. Hussey, Maurice. The World of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. New York: The Viking Press, 1972.

78-107. The book gives an overview of the details of two Shakespeare comedies, A Midsummer Nights Dream, and The Winter's Tale. It helps us to better understand Shakespeare's plays. *Molinari. Theatre Through the Ages. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972. 219. The visual from Shakespeare's comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor comes from this source. "Some of the Predictable Patterns in Shakespeare's Plays." website. ~eloewe/ (24 Nov. 1997). This website gives a basic overview of the many trends in Shakespeare's plays. It tells what is included in a comedy, and it describes the patterns in Shakespeare's plays. It also compares the comedies and the tragedies. *Source for visual The Winter's Tale Rogero: Lord who tells other gentlemen that a prophecy by the Delphic Oracle has been fulfilled. Minor Characters: Other lords, gentlemen, ladies, officers, servants, shepherds, shepherdesses. Plot Summary By Michael J. Cummings...ï¿½ 2003 . .

It is time for Polixenes, King of Bohemia, to end his visit with his boyhood friend Leontes, king of Sicily. While the two kings prepare to bid farewell in a state room of the Sicilian palace, a Bohemian lord named Archidamus and a Sicilian lord named Camillo are in an antechamber discussing the extraordinary friendship between the two rulers. Camillo, advisor to Leontes, observes that they were inseparable when growing up: ï¿½They were trained together in their childhoods; and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection, which cannot choose but branch nowï¿½ (1.1.10). Archidamus says nothing will ever come between the two kings. (His observation is an ironic foreshadowing of a terrible jealousy that will soon divide them.) He also praises the Sicilian kingï¿½s little boy, Mamillius, as the finest of lads with the brightest of futures.

(This, too, is an ominous observation.) In the state room, King Leontes presses King Polixenes to linger in Sicily one more week, but Polixenes begs off, worrying about ï¿½what may chance / Or breedï¿½ (1.2. 15-16) in Bohemia in his absence. When Hermione, the beautiful wife of Leontes, joins her husband in importuning Polixenes to extend his visit, he agrees to remain a while longer. Pulling him aside, she asks what his childhood was like with her husband. Polixenes replies, We were, fair queen, Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career Of laughing with a sigh? (1.2.332-335) Finally, he orders Camillo to bear a poisoned cup to Polixenes. Camillo tells the king he will perform the deadly mission, but then warns the Bohemian king that his life is in danger. During the night, Polixenes steals away. Camillo, estranged by Leontesï¿½s behavior, accompanies Polixenes.

Their sudden departure convinces Leontes his suspicions against Hermione are well founded. Angry and bitter, he publicly denounces his wife, who is soon to have another child, as an adulteress. After imprisoning her, he deprives her of the company of little Mamillius. Hermione pleads her innocence, to no avail. She is guilty; Leontes is certain of it. To confirm her guilt for others, he sends two lords, Cleontes and Dion, to the Oracle at Delphi, Greece, to request a judgment. After Hermione bears a daughter, her servant, Paulina, presents the infant to Leontes, hoping the sight of the little girl will quench his anger. However, wrathful as ever, Leontes disowns the childï¿½believing it is not his ownï¿½and orders Paulinaï¿½s husband, Antigonus, to abandon it in a far-off place. Leontes then subjects Hermione to a public trial. With utmost dignity and grace, she proclaims her innocence, declaring she has always been faithful to Leontes. During the trial, Cleontes and Dion return from Delphi with a sealed verdict from the great Oracle.

An official of the court breaks the seal and reads the verdict: "Hermione is chaste; Polixenes blameless; Camillo a true subject; Leontes a jealous tyrant; his innocent babe truly begotten; and the king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found" (3.2.134). Leontes rejects the verdict and orders the trial to continue. A servant interrupts the proceedings with tragic news: Prince Mamillius, pining for his jailed motherï¿½s love, has died. The news staggers Leontes, and Hermione collapses. Suddenly realizing how wrong he has been, Leontes tells Hermioneï¿½s attendants to treat her gently when they escort her from the courtroom. Later, Leontes receives another shock: Hermione, too, has died. Profoundly moved, the king laments his vengeful deeds and goes off to mourn. What of the newly born child, the infant princess?

As instructed, Antigonus leaves her in a far-off place, the coast of Bohemia, along with certain effects, including a note identifying the infant as ï¿½Perdita,ï¿½ a name that came to Antigonus when he imagined he saw Hermione in a vision. But before Antigonus can return to his ship, a bear attacks and kills him and an angry sea wrecks the ship and swallows it and all aboard. Consequently, no one is left to report the fate of the child. A clown, the son of a 67-year-old shepherd, witnessed the bear attack and gives a report to his father, who discloses news of his own: He has found a baby girl on the coast along with a ï¿½bearing clothï¿½ and gold. Sixteen Years Pass Shakespeare updates the audience on important developments through a speaker called Time. He tells the audience that Leontes now lives in seclusion and that the setting of the drama has shifted to Bohemia, where the son of Polixenes has fallen in love with a shepherdess.

In Bohemia, Polixenes stews about his son, Florizel, because the young man frequently visits the house of an elderly shepherd to woo his beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter, Perdita. Because of her lowly status, she is unworthy of Florizelï¿½s attentions, Polixenes believes. Polixenes and Camillo, who has become the advisor of the king, decide to call at the shepherdï¿½s house to observe Florizel and Perdita during a sheep-shearing and feast in which visitors are welcome. They wear disguises. Also present are the old shepherd and his son; a shepherdess, Mopsa (who hopes to marry the shepherdï¿½s son) and her friend, Dorcas; and a thief, Autolycus, who has presented himself as a seller of ballads after arriving while singing a song. Earlier, Autolycus had picked the clownï¿½s pocket on a road near the shepherdï¿½s cottage. When Polixenes discovers that Florizel plans to marry Perdita, Polixenes reveals his identity and threatens retaliation against anyone who abets the wedding plans.

Sympathizing with the lovers, Camillo persuades them to abscond to Sicily. Later, at Camilloï¿½s request, Autolycus assists in the escape plan by gladly trading his shabby clothes with the princely garb of Florizel. Dressed as a commoner, Florizel will be able to avoid detection on his way to a ship. Before returning to the palace, Camillo tells the audience in an aside that he will provoke Polixenes into following the lovers. His purpose is not to betray the lovers; rather, it is to go with Polixenes to Sicily, for which Camillo has been homesick these many long years in Bohemia. His scheme works and Polixenes prepares to follow the lovers in his own ship. Elsewhere, the old shepherd and his son are on their way to see Polixenes at his palace. The shepherd carries a box containing keepsakes of Perdita from long ago. These objects, he believes, will prove that Perdita is not his daughter and, thus, enable him and his son to escape the kingï¿½s wrath.

On their way, they meet Autylocus, still dressed in Florizelï¿½s clothes; they think he is a royal personage. When he says the king is about to embark on a ship to chase Florizel and Perdita, they offer him gold to take him to the ship and speak for them. But because he is not who he says he is, he takes them to Prince Florizelï¿½s ship. All of themï¿½Florizel, Perdita, Autolycus, the old shepherd, and his sonï¿½then set sail for Sicily ahead of the kingï¿½s ship. Many days pass while the ships are at sea. The setting then shifts to Sicily. When Florizel and Perdita arrive at the palace of Leontes and wait for an audience with him, a gentleman of the court informs the king of their presence, announcing them as the Prince and Princess of Bohemia. He says the princess is the most beautiful creature he has ever seen.

After they are escorted into the court, Florizel greets Leontes on behalf of his father, Polixenes, saying an infirmity prevented Polixenes from making the trip himself. When Leontes inquires about the lovely Perdita, Florizel describes her as the daughter of a Libyan lord. He and the princess sojourned in that African country, he says, before sailing to Sicily to carry out a mission for his father. While Leontes visits with the young couple, all of the others from Bohemia assemble at the court: the old shepherd, his son, and Autolycus, as well as the travelers from the other shipï¿½King Polixenes and Camillo. Leontes, now a reformed man who is deeply sorry for his past misdeeds, reconciles with Polixenes and Camillo. The old shepherd and his son then reveal the contents of the mysterious box of keepsakes. It contains a ï¿½bearing-clothï¿½ (3.3.77) Hermione had given to Antigonus. Leontes recognizes it as Hermioneï¿½s, unique because of a jewel on it.

He also recognizes the handwriting in the note Antigonus left before a bear attacked and killed him. Just as convincing as these items identifying Perdita is the remarkable resemblance Perdita bears to Hermione. King Leontes joyfully reunites with his daughter and accepts Florizel as his future son-in-law; Polixenes accepts Perdita as his future daughter-in-law. Leontesï¿½s joy, though, is tinged with sadness, for he still grieves over the loss of Hermione. Paulina, the servant who sixteen years before pleaded on Hermioneï¿½s behalf, then invites Leontes to her house to show him a statue of Hermione, sculpted by an Italian master. While the royals and nobles are on their way to Paulinaï¿½s, Autolycus begs and receives the forgiveness of the old shepherd and his son for deceiving them back in Bohemia, then taking their gold and putting them on the wrong ship. Upon viewing the statue at Paulinaï¿½s house, Leontes discovers that it is no statue; it is the real Hermione. She has been living in hiding with Paulina these many years praying for the return of her daughter.

Paulina was afraid to disclose Hermioneï¿½s whereabouts for fear of interfering with the will of the Delphic Oracle, as expressed in the prediction that ï¿½the king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not foundï¿½ (3.2.134). In other words, Leontesï¿½if reunited earlier with Hermioneï¿½might have fathered another child. In so doing, he would have produced an heir before his lost child had been found. The will of the Oracle would have been defeated. When Perdita appears, Hermione rejoices and invokes the gods to bless her child. The joy of the occasion spills over to include a proposal by Leontes that Camillo and Paulina marry. And what of Mamillius, the little prince? Nothing can bring him back, but Leontes does have a new son in the person of Florizel. Great Buys on the Following Items at Amazon.com SparkNotes: The Winter's Tale: Analysis The Winter's Tale Act V, Scenes i-iii Study Questions The Winter's Tale is a perfect tragicomedy.

Set in an imaginary world where Bohemia has a seacoast, and where ancient Greek oracles coexist with Renaissance sculptors, it offers three acts of unremitting tragedy, followed by two acts of restorative comedy. In between, sixteen years pass hastily, a lapse which many critics have taken as a structural flaw, but which actually only serves to highlight the disparity of theme, setting, and action between the two halves of the play. The one is set amid gloomy winter, and illuminates the destructive power that mistaken jealousy exercises over the family of Leontes, King of Sicilia; in the second half, flower-strewn spring intervenes, and all the damage that the King's folly accomplished is undone—through coincidence, goodwill, and finally through miracle, as a statue of his dead wife comes to life and embraces him. As the force behind the tragedy stems from Leontes's belief that his wife, Hermione, and best friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia, are lovers, so Leontes has attracted more critical interest than any other character in the play.

An Othello who is his own Iago, he is a perfect paranoiac, convinced that he has all the facts and ready to twist any counter-argument to fit his (mistaken) perception of the world. Perhaps because of its uncertain origin, Leontes's madness is a terrifying thing: he becomes a poet of nihilism, demanding, when told that there is "nothing" between Hermione and Polixenes, "Is this nothing? / Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing, / The covering sky's nothing, Bohemia nothing, / My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, / If this be nothing"(I.ii.292-296). The roots of his jealousy seem to run too deep for the play to plumb—there are hints of misogyny, of dynastic insecurity, and of an inability to truly separate himself psychologically from Polixenes, but no definitive answers. Indeed, the only answer is his own—in one of Shakespeare's finer images, Leontes says "I have drunk, and seen the spider"(II.i.45).

To balance his morbid, brooding nihilism and sexual jealousy, Shakespeare makes Leontes's daughter Perdita a poet of spring, rebirth, and revitalization, whose own lover (Polixenes's son Florizel) is as constant and generous as Leontes is suspicious and cruel. She appears decked in flowers, and when she dispenses them to everyone around her, the play links her with Proserpina, Roman goddess of the spring and growing things. If Leontes is a tragic hero, then she is a fairy-tale heroine, a princess reared among commoners who falls in love with a prince and—eventually—lives happily ever after. Leontes casts her out as an infant in Act III, when he is in the grip of darkness; in Act V she returns to him, and restores him to happiness. The miracle of Hermione's resurrection at the play's close is only a fitting close to the spirit of rebirth that Perdita brings into the story. The play is also notable for its rich group of supporting characters.

Hermione is an exemplary and eloquent figure, despite the fact that she spends the play defending herself against unjust accusations, and her friend Paulina is the voice of sanity while Leontes is mad and then the voice of reminder and penance once he regrets his crimes. The rustic Shepherd who takes in Perdita and the ever-faithful lord, Camillo are both sympathetic characters, too, but none can match Autolycus, the peddler, thief and minstrel who is a harmless villain (he robs, lies, and cheats)—so harmless, in fact, that the audience forgives and even applauds him as he sings, dances, and robs his way through the play, contriving even to find time to provide a helping hand to the other characters as they struggle toward their happy ending. More Help

Question: Which Shakespeare play is set in Bohemia?
Answer: 'A WINTER'S TALE'